Customize your fill series and speed up your data entry

Customize your fill series and speed up your data entry

by T. L. Thomas and Margaret Kavanagh

Application:

Microsoft Excel 2000/2002/ 2003/2004/2007

Operating Systems:

Microsoft Windows, Macintosh

Although Excel is smart enough to extend fill series, such as numbers, months, and days of the week, you may feel frustrated when it doesn’t help with other series you work with every day, such as U.S. time zones or employee names. Rather than typing the same series worksheet after worksheet, you can create a custom fill series that does your typing for you.

To streamline data entry using custom fill series (aka custom lists), we’ll:

•     Create a custom list from scratch.

•     Generate a list from existing data so you can avoid retyping the list’s entries.

•     Edit and delete a custom list for ultimate control over the lists you store.

When creating worksheets, you may regularly use a series of associated items that aren’t numeric or date-related, and you probably end up typing the series each time. Rather than repeatedly typing (or copying and pasting from another worksheet), you can create a custom fill series.

Streamline data entry

The Fill feature can extend a data series based on a numerical value. Excel also automatically extends series based on calendar months or days, as shown in Table A.

Table A:

Excel can automatically extend a series with the Fill feature if that series involves numbers or calendar dates.

[...]

If you enter:	Excel can expand it to:
1, 2, 3	4, 5, 6 …
Page 1, Page 2, Page 3	Page 4, Page 5, Page 6 …
1st Qtr	2nd Qtr, 3rd Qtr, 4th Qtr